gardens.  In those two-twenties we saw China split into three; and it rather looked as if the manvantara had ended.  I shall not look at West Asia yet, but leave it for a future lecture.  But in Europe, with Marcus Aurelius died almost the last Italian you could call a Crest-Wave Ego.  The cyclic forces, outworn and old, produced after that no order that you can go upon:  events followed each other higgledipiggledy and inertly;—­ but it was the Illyrian legions that put him on the throne.  Note that Illyria:  it is what we shall soon grow accustomed to calling Jugoslavia. Severus’s reign of eighteen years, from 193 to 211, was the only strong one, almost the only one not disgraceful, until 268; by which time the Roman world was in anarchy, split into dozens, with emperors springing up like mushrooms everywhere.  Then came a succession of strong soldiers who reestablished unity:  Claudius Gothicaus, an Illyrian peasant; Aurelian, an Illyrian peasant; Tacitus, a Roman senator, for one year only; Probus, an Illyrian peasant; Caus, an Illyrian; then the greatest of all statesmen since Hadian, who refounded the empire on a new plan,—­the Illyrian who began life as Docles the slave, rose to be Diocles the soldier, and finally, in 284, tiaraed Diocletian reigning with all the pomp and mystery and magnificence of an Eastern King of kings.  He it was who felt the cyclic flow, and moved his capital to Nicomedia, which is about fifty miles south and east from Constaintinople.

One can speak of no Illyrian cycle; rather only of the Crest-Wave dropping a number of strong men there as it trailed eastward towards West Asia.  The intellect of the empire, in that third century, and the spiritual force, all incarnated in the Roman West-Asian seats; in Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria, as we shall see in a moment.  But you not how bueautifully orderly, in a geographical sense, are the movements of the Wave in Roman world and epoch:  beginning in Italy in the first century B.C.; going west to Spain about A.D. 1,—­and to Gaul too, though there kindling chiefly material and industrial greatness; passing through Italy again in the late first and in the second century, in the time of the Glavians and the five Good Emperors; then in the third like a swan flying eastward, with one wing, the material one, stretched over Illyria raising up mighty soldiers and administrators there, and the other, the spiritual wing, over Egypt, there fanning (as we shall see) the fires of esotericism to flame.

For it was in that third century, while disaster on disaster was engulfing the power and prestige of Rome, that the strongest spiritual movement of all the Roman period came into being.  History would not take much note of the year in which a porter in Alexandria was born; so the birth-date of the man we come to now is unknown.  It would have been, however, not later than 180; since he had among his pupils one man at least born not later than 185.  According